The Ripper Gene (6 page)
“Katie, what’s the matter?” I asked, hurriedly unchaining the lock and opening the door. “Is everyone okay?”
Katie stared up at me from inside the soggy hood of a navy blue raincoat. She smoothed a wet lock of brown hair away from her forehead. “The girls are fine; they’re at a sleepover.”
“So what’s going on?”
“Tyler just called me. It’s Mara. She’s disappeared.”
I gave a dismissive laugh. “Are you kidding me? You came all the way over to tell me this in person?”
“Tyler’s really worried, Lucas. He’d never admit it, but he needs your help.” Katie pushed past me and I stepped aside.
“Let Tyler worry, then,” I said, closing the door behind her. “It’s not my problem anymore. Let him learn to get used to her disappearing acts.”
Katie walked around the corner of the vestibule and vanished into the living room. “Come on, I’m frozen from the rain. Make me some hot chocolate.”
I wanted to tell my sweet little sister that I was going to bed, that she was welcome to all the hot chocolate in the house and she could shut the door herself on the way out.
Instead, I sauntered into the living room behind her.
Katie called over her shoulder. “Be right back, I have to go to the bathroom.” Her footsteps echoed down the hallway into the rear of the house.
I poured water into the teapot and set it on the burner.
Mara Bliss. I’d bumped into her shortly after I moved back down South to transfer into the New Orleans field office. She’d become an art dealer, a successful one, and matured into one of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen. Her deep brown skin had blossomed into a gorgeous complexion, so smooth and soft that it had the same magical effect as seeing a van Gogh—it drew you in, and dared you to touch it. The same day we ran into each other, I’d summoned the courage to ask her to dinner. Much to my surprise, she’d accepted.
Within weeks we were an item, and she single-handedly pulled me through the aftermath of the Alvarez case. For a short time, I thought we had a chance.
But Mara had tons of money, too much time on her hands, and a wild streak that I couldn’t have possibly foreseen. She was an unpredictable woman, to say the least. One of her peculiar habits was simply what I called her “disappearing acts.” She would leave for days at a time, claiming that she was visiting once-in-a-lifetime exhibitions at one art museum or another.
Toward the end of our relationship she began to spiral into deviant sexual behavior, begging me to follow. Unfortunately the quasi violence that she so craved in the bedroom became too reminiscent of the all-too-real sexual depravation I often battled for a living. Eventually, I had to get out.
The night we broke was memorable for all the wrong reasons. I mainly remembered the kinetics of her wild appearance, made all the more chaotic by her anger. Her brown skin shining in the moonlight, raven-black curls lashing back and forth, seafoam eyes, maroon lips bared in a sneer that made her look like a vampire. She’d gone wild when I broke with her, and immediately began hurling accusations of infidelity, demanding over and over to know who it was, who was I fucking, what whore I was fucking, what tramp. She’d screamed at me in a small park until I realized we’d probably never talk in civil tones again. I walked away from her, uttering one last good-bye that she couldn’t have heard above the cacophony of her own hatred.
I never looked back.
Ironically, I learned later that she’d already been seeing my brother for at least a month before I finally decided to end things with her. What a fool I’d been. Last I’d heard from Katie, now more than a year later, Mara and my little brother were engaged.
Apparently Tyler didn’t have the same kinds of hang-ups about S&M that his big brother had.
* * *
Katie’s voice sounded in my ears. “Lucas. Are you listening? This isn’t typical. She left with no warning whatsoever. She—”
“You’re wrong, Kate. It’s
completely
typical. She disappeared half a dozen times for days on end back when we were together. I finally got sick of it. Maybe Tyler will finally wise up, too.”
“But nothing’s gone. None of her bags are missing. It’s like she just vanished into thin air.” Katie poured hot water into her cup and sat down at the table across from me.
“Maybe she bought a new suitcase,” I finally offered. “Maybe some new clothes. Who knows? Trust me—this is one of Mara’s grand disappearing acts. Same old same old. If Tyler’s too blind to see it, then he’ll have to learn it for himself.”
“If something’s happened to her you’ll never forgive yourself.”
I was, in fact, pretty sure that I could indeed find a way to forgive myself, but I kept that to myself. “Okay, okay. I’ll call Donny and have Harrison County Sheriff’s Department look into it—I promise. But for now can we both just get some sleep? I can barely stay awake. In a couple of days this will all blow over. I guarantee it.”
Katie fixed me with an accusatory stare. Every day she looked more and more like our mother. She’d possessed all the features of my father at birth, but through the course of adulthood she’d barreled toward an unavoidable genetic end point. A head full of darkening brown hair, luminous brown eyes and tan skin, cheekbones that arched higher with each passing day—all of her facial structures slowly morphing into something so similar to our mother’s prominent features that it was, at times, unsettling.
“Everything will be fine,” I assured her.
“Okay. I’m sorry. It’s just that I can’t stand to see Tyler so worried like this.”
My sister’s words stung me. I wondered momentarily if she or anyone else had ever felt sorry for me when I went through the same shit with Mara, but I held my tongue. I wasn’t about to alienate the one remaining member of my immediate family who still talked to me. “I’ll talk to them, I promise. If she hits the twenty-four-hour mark, tell Tyler to file a missing persons report. She’s going to show up though, so please also advise him that I personally recommend he skip the missing persons report and just wait for her to pop back up.” I held up my hands to ward off any further interjections. “I’ll look into it tomorrow, I promise.”
Katie took a final sip from her cup and stood. “You’re a good big brother … despite the immensity of all your shortcomings.”
“I’ll accept that. Tell the girls I’ll see them at their football game this weekend. Are you sure you don’t want to stay over, leave in the morning?”
“No, no, I want to get back home. We’ll see you this weekend.” She kissed my forehead. “Good night, Lucas. Let me know if you hear anything about Mara.”
“I will.”
I walked her to the door. She walked down the front steps and I watched her until she drove out of the driveway and onto the road.
* * *
Back inside the kitchen I sat down at the table, wide awake. Talking with Katie had brought back too many memories of my mother. Desperate to take my mind off them, I tried to think about the case at hand.
For the time being, none of the evidence in the Cross and Harrison cases made much sense, and there was that one particular detail that was growing more troublesome by the moment. If I really was dealing with a serial killer, then it was one who left razored apples as a calling card in the same county where my own mother had been murdered in an apple orchard on a Halloween night twenty years before.
I stood up from the kitchen table and turned out the lights. It was stupid coincidence, nothing more. I couldn’t let my imagination run rampant.
In fact, it was just good old shithouse luck, as my grandfather often used to say.
Nothing more. Nothing less.
I found three messages on my cell phone the next morning.
The first was from none other than Jim Raritan himself. Somehow he’d already found out about the second victim and wanted to know whether I was dealing with it, asked in an I-told-you-so voice even more annoying as a recording than in real life. He also wanted to know when I would schedule a briefing for local law enforcement. It was just Jimmy’s way of telling me “No slow starts.” I could handle it.
The second was a voice from the past. Charlie Bliss, Mara’s father, left a terse message asking if I had any news on Mara’s whereabouts. When Mara and I were together, Charlie had been a second father to me. But the moment Mara and I broke off, Charlie disappeared from the face of the earth. This was the first I’d heard from him in over a year.
The final message was from
The Times-Picayune.
A reporter wanted to know if I had any statements concerning the “Snow White Killer.” I groaned. Apparently they’d put together the similarities between Anna Cross and Jessica Harrison, most notably the apples at the crime scenes and the black hair of the victims. In their endless pursuit of selling more papers, they’d come up with a catchy name for the murderer: the Snow White Killer.
I suspected it would stick. Everything I was involved with lately got a cute name tag to go along with it.
I set the cell phone on the nightstand and hoped that the rest of my day wouldn’t annoy me as much as the first five minutes had.
* * *
On my morning drive to work I found myself thinking about Mara Bliss. She had been my first kiss, in a graveyard outside my father’s first church in Crossroads, Mississippi. I still remembered every detail—the white moon hanging in the sky, the knee-high grass swishing around us, and the intermittent buzzing of cicadas surrounding us. I still remembered how that first silk-lipped kiss had stunned me into inaction, much as the kiss that Halloween night had taken my breath away a few months later.
I was amazed that I could still become lost in the memories of that first kiss, feeling my stomach drop away as she and I crouched only a few feet away from the sepulchre of her dead grandfather, in the middle of that graveyard. Little had I known at the time that in only a few months my mother would be murdered and buried there, too, laid to eternal rest only a few feet away.
The cell phone bleated in my pocket and jarred me from the memory. Ragged breathing greeted me from the other end, hard, desperate, and out of control. Then a hauntingly familiar voice filled my head. “Lucas?”
“Mara?” Though surprised to hear from her, I immediately breathed a sigh of relief as I realized I’d be able to put Katie’s worst fears to rest in an I-told-you-so voice all my own. Mara’s next words, however, stopped me cold.
“Lucas. I don’t want to die like the others. Please don’t kill me.”
“What?”
“Please come back, Lucas. Please don’t kill me like the other girl.”
“Mara, what are you talking about?”
Alternating inhalations and deep breaths of sobbing came from the other end. “Lucas, you said you’d act like this, and you told me not to let you do it. You have to come back here and get me. You have to come back to Nana’s house.”
I tried to interject, but she spoke again.
“She wasn’t moving. You told me to read what you wrote on her forehead, but I couldn’t see it. Please don’t kill me when you come back, Lucas. Please.”
The phone line clicked off. A cloying horror rose in the back of my throat as I struggled to assimilate the one-sided conversation.
First, “Nana” was Mara’s name for her grandmother. Her grandmother had died years ago, but she’d resided outside New Hope, only twelve or so miles away. Second, Mara had asked
me
not to kill her. In fact, she’d asked me not to kill her “like the others,” which meant that for some inconceivable reason she thought I not only wanted to kill her, but that I’d killed someone else as well. Third, and most chillingly, she’d alluded to writing on another woman’s forehead.
I swerved into the wide swath of marshy grass separating the north-and southbound lanes of I-10. I turned one hundred and eighty degrees and headed back up the interstate in the opposite direction, back toward Mississippi. New Hope was in Harrison County. I punched Donny’s number on my cell phone. “Donny?”
“Speaking.”
“It’s Lucas. Listen. I just received a strange phone call, and I need to check it out. It was from Mara.”
The silence on the other end reminded me: Donny wasn’t a big fan of Mara Bliss. “I see.”
“Donny. She’s been missing for a couple of days now, and she just called me.”
“And?”
“And she asked me not to kill her. Not to kill her like the others.”
“What the fuck’s that supposed to mean?”
“No idea. And that’s not everything. She also said that she couldn’t read what I’d written on another girl’s forehead.”
That information had the same effect on Donny as I’d experienced a moment before. “Holy shit. Where are you right now?”
“She said she’s at her grandmother’s house. I’m on my way right now.”
“Where’s her grandmother’s house?”
“New Hope. Can you guys meet me over there?”
“What’s the address?”
“I don’t know, but I can remember how to get there. She lived on Wolf Road.”
“Aw shit, in the bayou. You can get lost for years out there if you don’t know where you’re going. Alright, we’ll figure it out and meet you there.”
I hung up and pressed the gas pedal to the floor. The old familiar panic set in, the frantic despair I hadn’t felt since Richmond almost three years ago.
A sign said New Hope was only eleven miles away. I pushed the Explorer to one hundred miles an hour, hoping the incremental increase in speed might actually help me save Mara Bliss.
From a killer who, for some unfathomable reason, she believed to be me.
Fifteen minutes later I pulled my SUV into the weed-choked driveway of her grandmother’s abandoned house and jolted to a tumultuous stop. Red dust billowed in all directions as a swirling breeze swept across the yard. I opened my door and exited the vehicle, squinting my eyes but keeping them locked on the house ahead. I held my Luger in one hand, pointing it at the house in what must have seemed a ridiculous fashion, while clutching the two-way radio receiver in the other. Its curly cord tethered me to the dashboard of the parked vehicle like an astronaut on a space walk. I continued to stare at the dilapidated old house, debating whether to call Donny as he’d asked or to go on in alone.